After the dumbness, a renewed commitment to the BOINC
Greeting fellow Gridcoin supporters and BOINCers.
After my epiphany yesterday and finally figuring out why my BOINC manager keeps giving me an error and refusing to BOINC I thought I'd give an update.
It seems that for some reason my BOINC client isn't auto-initialising on startup and keeps leaving the manager hanging. If I manually start the client and leave the CMD window open then the manager picks it up and everything is shiny.
I also realised that grcpool.com was picking up two instances of my rig. One being the original from before it all went sideways and now a second one after the manual restart. After deleting the "legacy" host and setting up Asteroids@Home and World Community Grid on the new host I am finally able to BOINC and contribute to Team Gridcoin again!
I'm very excited to see what my new Gigabyte GTX 1060 6GB can deliver in terms of Mag and RAC after my ancient MSI GTS 450 which delivered about 1 GRC per day. This is what my Mag looks like at the moment:
The little bit running at the moment is my Core i3 laptop that I pretty much forgot about after setting it up. In retrospect it probably explains why my wife is forever complaining about how slow it is... I need to set my Acer tablet up again as well. It doesn't do much but every bit helps, right?
I will keep you guys updated as to what the 1060 can do but I'm pretty much just happy to be BOINCing again!
Team South Africa banner designed by @bearone
Mind a little tip? If you want to leave your computer boincing while you dont use it, use linux. You could use BoincOS, which is being developed here. In general boinc apps are optimized for linux (they are built for linux and then ported), linux has less services running in the background (system interrupts hurt a lot boinc projects), and probably the best feature is that as you can exit the graphic enviroment, you can squeeze an extra 15% to your gpu, for free.
Tips are always appreciated! I'd use Linux but I'm BOINCing off my gaming rig and not a dedicated miner. I doubt my games would run on Linux but it might be something to check out.
I've set my BOINC manager to run no matter what so hopefully background services won't interfere too much.
There are a fuckton of games in linux nowadays, only lacks the beefy AAAs (which i never play anyway) and LoL as heavy hitters, but other than that it has plenty of.
As for background services, i was more talking about how, when you are multitasking two processes who use all the resources they can get, the perfomance drops a lot because the cpu has to send a halt signal to the process, load the process, do a bit of computation and restart the cycle, easily you can throw 33% of cpu perfomance, but it depends on many factors.
And well, Windows 7 isnt that bad, but windows 10 starts doing a lot of task whenever it detects nobody is using the computer.
Hmmm... I use Windows 7 on my rig and 10 on my laptop. I wonder if I could run the BOINC client on a virtual linux machine? Otherwise I could dual boot linux alongside Windows. I have an empty partition on my primary hard drive.
That would make it even slower. Specially after the meltdown bug (i assume you have an intel laptop), which hits virtualization really hard.
Both are Intel machines. Main rig is a Core i7 and the laptop is an i3. I guess I will have to stick with Windows.
Don't worry about it, you're fine running BOINC on a Windows machine - that's at the heart of the BOINC network anyways. Just have fun and BOINC.
Thanks for giving me a laugh with your crappiest place comment! It was just what I needed.
Thanks for running the competition. I had a good chuckle at some of the other people's comments too!